Sara Plourde

Digital Producer & Designer

Sara has been a part of the NHPR Digital team since 2011, when she began volunteering in New Media, later joining the Word of Mouth team as Associate Producer in Digital Media, and finally transitioning into the role of Digital Producer & Designer.

Her work includes news and programming infographics, original stories reported on the web, photo blogs, video, and illustrated supplemental content. Sara also works on the fund drive & events teams, and designs underwriting art for NHPR business supporters.

Prior to joining NHPR, Sara worked as a books reviewer for Broken Pencil Magazine (Toronto, ON), theater designer, and high school teacher. Outside of work, she enjoys gaming, reading, and bookbinding.

Sara holds a Bachelor of Fine Art from New Hampshire Institute of Art, where she studied photography, printmaking, and digital media. She has works in NHIA's permanent collection and the Special Collections at Teti Library.

Ways to Connect

Tom Gauld -- a cartoonist, illustrator of comics and covers for the New Yorker and The Believer . His weekly cartoon about the arts for The Guardian newspaper is a wry, often deadpan favorite among writers. He is extremely prolific, author of more than a dozen books of comics, including You're Just Jealous of My Jetpack and most recently Mooncop . The lunar cop is perfectly Gauldian character - doesn't say much, spends a lot of time walking the...

A National Book Award winner, Pulitzer-Prize nominee, Guggenheim fellow, and winner of a MacArthur "genius" grant, Colson Whitehead's new book, The Underground Railroad , was one of the most anticipated works of fiction this year. Virginia caught up with him backstage at the Capitol Center for the Arts in Concord, New Hampshire before a reading with novelist Ben Winters hosted of Gibson’s Bookstore.

The race for control of the New Hampshire Senate is playing out across the state’s 24 Senate districts. But, thanks in part to years of partisan gerrymandering , the majority of those districts are not terribly competitive, with either Democrats or Republicans all but guaranteed a victory. In fact, there’s just a handful of true “battleground” Senate districts which could decide the balance of power in the chamber. To illustrate just how narrow the partisan divide of the current state Senate...

It’s our 30th episode, this time with the phenomenally successful Jodi Picoult. Small Great Things is her 24th novel - and the ninth straight to debut at number one on the New York Times bestseller list. If Picoult has a "thing" it's writing about thorny ethical issues from the perspective of multiple characters...and a twisty ending! She's written in the voice of suicidal teens, rape victims, a school shooter…but until now, never as a black character and never directly...

Among the presidential candidates, environmental issues haven’t gotten much play this campaign season. Here in New Hampshire, that’s not quite the case, especially in the gubernatorial race where issues like Northern Pass, solar and wind energy and high energy costs have helped shape the campaign.

In this episode of the 10-Minute Writer’s Workshop , singer-songwriter, musician and novelist Josh Ritter – who might say writer first, musician second. It was a song that spun into his 2011 novel Bright's Passage . Josh Ritter’s songs draw deeply from the narrative traditions of American and Scottish folk music he studied after dropping out of the neuroscience program at Oberlin. They're little stories of character and place...wild prairies, snake oil salesman, teenage lust...

National security has proven to be a pivotal issue in this year's Senate race between Sen. Kelly Ayotte and Gov. Maggie Hassan. Ayotte, a Republican, has cast herself as a strong advocate for the nation's security, pointing to her record in the Senate. Hassan, a Democrat, has taken some positions that put her at odds with her own party and President Obama.

Legal decisions are rarely read for pleasure. And though read, re-read, excerpted and quoted, they are not always "quotable." Clocking in at an average of just under 5000 words, they can sound jargony, pompous and bone-dry in the wrong hands. But what about the right hands? Today's 10-Minute Writers Workshop asks an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States about what goes into writing an opinion. Justice Stephen Breyer was appointed to the Supreme Court...

The novelist, short story writer and essayist Cynthia Ozick's best known piece of writing is called The Shawl , a brutal, phantasmal story of a woman and two children marching to a Nazi concentration camp. The Holocaust and Jewish identity are recurring topics in Ozick's fiction and criticism. Growing up in the Bronx, she was called Christ-killer, and humiliated for not singing Christmas carols at school. Now 88, her 7th volume of criticism, Critics, Monsters, Fanatics, And Other...

New Hampshire voters had the biggest field of candidates for governor to consider that they've had in twenty years--seven people wanted the job. But how much can a New Hampshire governor actually do, anyway?

Andre Dubus III's memoir Townie told the story of his violent childhood on the wrong side of the tracks. Writing was his way out, and he's made more than good, with multiple NYT bestsellers, an Oprah’s Book Club pick, and an Oscar-nominated film adaptation (for his novel The House of Sand and Fog ). And he gets out there, as a public speaker and writing instructor for graduate programs, seminars and retreats. We caught up with him at New Hampshire Writers’ Project's annual...

You might already be overwhelmed by the number of TV ads about this year's U.S. Senate race between Kelly Ayotte and Maggie Hassan. And if you're like a lot of people, you're confused about who's paying for all these 30-second commercials, and why. Before you tune it out completely, here's a video guide to navigating the political advertising - and money - behind this important race. A Citizen's Survival Guide to Outside Spending from New Hampshire Public Radio on Vimeo .

At thirteen miles in length, New Hampshire has the shortest coastline of any US state (excluding those with no coast at all). But what it lacks in distance, it makes up for in vibrancy. As part of our series Life on the Seacoast , I traveled the full length of NH's coast, along Highway Route 1, stopping each mile to document the happenings and the habitats on the way. Click here to view the photo essay in its entirety .

As New Hampshire students head back to school this week, education is on many parents’ minds. And with the gubernatorial primary less than two weeks away, candidates’ positions on these issues could play a major role on voters’ decisions. In this year’s governor’s race, the candidates’ views fall largely along party lines, with differences over how much and where to spend money.

Kelly Link is one of a handful of writers to manage to be wondrous, fantastical and ominous at the same time. As Kirkus says, her work is “like Kafka hosting Saturday Night Live, mixing humor with existential dread.” Her most recent collection, Get in Trouble, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in fiction. She and her husband manage Small Beer Press.

Essayist, novelist, columnist, sportswriter and former ethicist for the New York Times Magazine , Chuck Klosterman has got a wildly original voice. That makes sense for a guy who's written about glam metal bands in North Dakota, or whether you should hire a detective to trail your spouse. He's author of several best-sellers including Sex, Drugs & Cocoa Puffs and most recently But What If We're Wrong?: Thinking About the Present As If It Were the Past.

Anyone who's ever been an awkward adolescent knows that for decades now, dog-eared copies of Judy Blume's books have been passed around school playgrounds like secrets, or read under the covers after lights out. Her best known books - Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret , Deenie , Blubber , and Forever - offered young readers plain language and shame -free stories about periods, bullying, sexual urges and, even 'going all the way'. Judy Blume finally...

Donald Hall is now 87 and no longer writing poetry, a pursuit he calls "a young man's game" which takes "too much testosterone." But Hall, former Poet Laureate of both New Hampshire and the United States, long ago cemented his place in literary history. In this episode of the 10-Minute Writer's Workshop, Virginia and Sara traveled to Hall's home in Wilmot, NH, to speak to him - getting lost along the way, and, ultimately, finding themselves right at home.

The bestselling author of Major Pettigrew's Last Stand - and bonafide Charming British Lady - Helen Simonson lets us in on her writing process, her thoughts on sunshine, and the perils of HGTV. Her latest novel, set in 1914, is The Summer Before the War .

Richard Russo is the Pulitzer prize-winning author of Empire Falls and Nobody’s Fool - both were adapted into films starring Paul Newman. He returns to the fictional working class town of North Bath for his most recent novel, Everybody's Fool .

We sat down with him on the darkened stage of an eerily empty theater before an extended interview at the Capitol Center for the Arts in Concord, NH.

As a writer, Joe Hill's family name could have given him a leg up. Instead, he chose to create his own. In this episode of the 10-Minute Writer's Workshop , we talk to Joe about his process and how he came to it, growing up in a literary home, and what he would be doing if he wasn't writing.

We sat down with the best-selling author just before his appearance at Writers on a New England Stage at the Music Hall in Portsmouth, NH, where he was discussing...

"Kill 'em and leave" was James Brown's commandment to his band before every show...it's also the title of a biography of the soul legend, the latest by James McBride. The National Book Award winner is also a musician and composer. We sat down with him just before his appearance at the Writers in the Loft series at the Music Hall Loft in Portsmouth, NH.

"Kill 'em and leave" was James Brown's commandment to his band before every show...it's also the title of a biography of the soul legend, the latest by James McBride. The National Book Award winner is also a musician and composer. We sat down with him just before his appearance at the Writers in the Loft series at the Music Hall Loft in Portsmouth, NH.

What's harder to write - the first sentence or the last? The first sentence, by a lot...because you're...

In this episode, married co-authors Kevin Flynn & Rebecca Lavoie. Together, they have written four true crime books, most recently Dark Heart: A True Story of Sex, Manipulation, and Murder . They are also two of the eponymous crime writers behind the podcast Crime Writers On...

What's harder to write - the first sentence or the last? Rebecca Lavoie: First Kevin Flynn: That's the big argument we always have, is how to start the...

On this episode, author, columnist and critic Olivia Laing. Her most recent work, The Lonely City , is part memoir, part searching exploration of loneliness and artists whose outsider experience inspired and fed their creativity - from seeming social gadfly Andy Warhol to the reclusive Henry Darger. She is also the author of To the River and The Trip to Echo Spring .

Alice Dreger is a historian of science, anatomy, and medicine, known for her work studying and advocating for people born with atypical sex disorders. She famously resigned from Northwestern University in protest of academic censorship, and gained some infamy on Twitter for live-tweeting her son's sex education class. We had a delightful chat with her about her writing process in advance of the paperback release of her book, Galileo's Middle Finger: Heretics, Activists, and the Search for...